A Special Gift

My BFF is celebrating her birthday today :-)

I wanted to make her something special.  One night not too long ago, as I was falling asleep, I thought, "It would be cool if I could get some fabric made with a print of her favorite photo."  Then I thought, "Hey, I could do that myself with photo transfer paper!"

The next day I headed over to Michael's, where I found this:

I'd never used transfer paper before, but the directions on the back of the package made it easy.  It was harder actually finding the photo in my old files, and then loading it into a photo edit program and cropping it to the correct size and flipping it to mirror image.   After printing the image onto the transfer paper, the instructions say to let it dry completely.

Once I'd done all that, I ironed my photo onto a piece of plain white muslin.  I had decided that I wanted to make a little zippered pouch with the image on both front and back, so I made each photo about 5 x 8 inches to fit them onto one sheet of transfer paper.

Once they were cooled, I trimmed them down.

Along the way, I fortuitously discovered that although this fabric can be washed,  you can not iron over it - it lifts up and melts the transfer!  I'm glad I found that out on one of my scraps rather than my nice pictures!

Which meant that while I was sewing my pouch together, I couldn't iron any of my seams flat or iron interfacing to the exterior fabric.  The transfer has a kind of rubbery feel, and it worked just fine to press it and my interfaced lining flat with my fingers.  I decided that I didn't want to interrupt the image on the outside of the bag, so I only topstitched the lining to the zipper after it was installed.

Then I proceeded to finish the bag, Noodlehead-style.  And here is the result:

I'm so happy with how this project turned out.  I definitely want to do something like this again.   I think it makes a great keepsake gift when made with a treasured photo, or maybe even a child's drawing!